Assassin's Creed Odyssey launched a year ago this week, and since then players have killed more than 20 billion enemies and taken 48 million photos, according to Ubisoft's stats. Well done! To celebrate the anniversary, there's a new schedule for epic encounters and Ubisoft is planning one more title update. 

Every day for the next five weeks, you'll be able to take down a returning epic mercenary or ship, letting you attempt to fill your collection and finish up everything before Ubisoft inevitably moves on to the next Assassin's Creed. Today you'll be able to kill Occylos the Successor, and you can check out the full schedule here. 

For taking out these enemies, you can expect a larger haul of Orichalcum, increasing your potential earnings per week from 40 to 105, which you can then spend in Sargon's shop. Next month, the epic encounters will return to their weekly schedule. 

The final title update will appear later this month, though the focus will just be on bug fixes. More details will be shared closer to the time, but it sounds like Kassandra and Alexios won't be going on any new mythological misadventures. After the year they've had, they've earned a break on a nice Greek island. 

I wasn't entirely sold on the series' full transformation into an RPG, but Odyssey rather quickly became my favourite Assassin's Creed. It's a bit too big and has diminishing returns, especially once you hit the DLC, so I confess that I'm glad it's finally finished, but for the first time in ages I'm really excited to find out where Ubisoft will take the series next. It might be about vikings!

There's a lot of fascinating history to devour in Discovery Tour, an educational new mode released for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. You can learn about the origins of the Olympic Games, the myth of the Minotaur, or the history of Athens' mighty Parthenon. But the tour focuses on more everyday things too: winemaking, religious practices, the role of women in society, and the running of a typical Greek household. And it's these things—these glimpses of the mundane, the human—that I really connected with as I wandered the streets, fields, and ruins of Ubisoft's dramatic take on Ancient Greece.

You can learn a lot more about this time period, and with more depth, from a history book, of course. But there's something magical about being there. Walking through the Acropolis of Athens, pushing through crowds of people, seeing the sun glint off that colossal bronze statue of Athena… it's utterly transporting. And it makes the various bite-sized history lessons contained in each location incredibly evocative, because you aren't just passively listening: you're there, experiencing it, watching it unfold around you.

Origins had its own Discovery Tour, but the voiceover was a little too dry, like something you'd hear looping on a screen in a stuffy museum, which was at odds with the scale and beauty of the world. But the Odyssey tour is much better at creating a sense of place and drawing you into the history. Lively, charismatic historical figures introduce each tour and beautiful cinematography accompanies the narration. The voiceover is still a little too pristine—I'd have liked those famous faces to perform the tours themselves—but they definitely have more personality than the presenters in Origins.

Odyssey's Discovery Tour is also great because it gives you a chance to explore Ancient Greece without being hassled by enemies. You can still sail ships, ride horses, and take to the sky with Ikaros, but you don't have to worry about getting into fights with mercenaries or being eaten by lions. It's an enjoyably sedate way to absorb the atmosphere of Ubisoft's remarkable open world, letting you exist there as a tourist, which is something I'd love to see more of in games. You can also switch to a first-person perspective, which makes those gleaming temples and monuments seem even more grand.

Bring up the world map and you can jump to any tour that piques your interest. These include learning about how the Greeks made wine on the island of Thasos, the relationship between the gods and romance at the Temple of Aphrodite, or the ancient city of Mycenae, which is said to have been founded by the legendary hero Perseus. The tours also tell you beforehand how many stops there are and how long they'll take, which is a nice consideration. All the map's fast travel points are unlocked as well, letting you travel freely.

On a tour you follow a glowing thread between points of interest, learning as you go. But you're also rewarded for venturing off the beaten path with optional lessons that unlock new playable characters including Socrates and Pythagoras. That's not my favourite new feature, though. When you finish a tour the character who introduced it will approach you and quiz you about what you've just heard. These quizzes are fun and light-hearted, and if you get an answer wrong they'll explain why it was wrong, rather than just scolding you for not paying attention. I was personally so determined to ace these quizzes that I made sure I was listening intently to every lesson.

These tours also made me realise just how much detail I was missing when I first played Assassin's Creed Odyssey. When you run through a town, you aren't really thinking about the clutter around you or the people roaming the streets. But after a few tours you realise how painstakingly detailed and well-researched everything is, down to the specific types of ovens the Greeks used, or how they dried grapes for winemaking. A nice side effect of the Discovery Tour is returning to the regular game and everything feeling richer.

The word 'edutainment' conjures up images of boring old CD-ROMs with low-res videos, or rubbish adventure games masquerading as entertainment. But Odyssey's Discovery Tour is rare because it's a legitimate piece of educational software that just happens to have the lavish production values of a blockbuster open world game. It's free for everyone who owns Odyssey or can be bought standalone on Uplay. So if you've ever wanted to immerse yourself in the culture, history, and atmosphere of Ancient Greece, this is the best way. Well, at least until someone invents a real-life Animus.

Even as open worlds become ever more common, Ubisoft remains the publisher most closely related to the genre. It's been churning out big playgrounds consistently for over a decade, and they won't stop growing. CEO Yves Guillemot says that won't be changing. 

While Assassin's Creed used to be all about exploring and killing your way through a city, the latest offers up all of Greece and its islands, along with three smaller worlds in the second DLC series. Odyssey is gargantuan. I finished up the last of the DLC last week after 150 hours. Syndicate, the last single-city Assassin's Creed, clocked in at around 30, or half that if you just did the story.   

Ubisoft's focus is now on those massive worlds, according to Guillemot. "Our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences."

Technically, yes, there are story arcs in Odyssey that are roughly the size of other games, but they're not complete, standalone experiences. You can't just play Fate of Atlantis DLC or a discrete chunk of Kassandra or Alexios's adventures in Greece. If you want a complete story, you'll need to invest at least 40 hours into it, and that's skipping the side quests and exploration.

I love Odyssey and it's probably the most fun I've had with an Assassin's Creed, finally bumping Black Flag of the top spot, but that's despite the absurd scale, not because of it. By the end I was just looking forward to it being over. 

While even Ghost Recon has made the leap to huge sandboxes, Watch Dogs Legion at least remains confined to a single city, even if it is one of the largest ones in the world. But it's not just the size of the maps that makes Ubisoft's more recent games such intimidating time sinks—it's their density. If you're planning a trip to London next year, I recommend setting aside a month at least. 

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is almost a year old, but Ubisoft is still cranking out significant free updates. Earlier in the month, the final quest in the Lost Tales of Greece series was added to the game, reuniting you with the extremely chatty Socrates, and today you can start soaking up the history of the ancient world by jumping into one of the new Discovery Tours. 

One of the things I miss from the older Assassin's Creeds are the historical asides. Whenever you came across an interesting building, you'd be able to do a bit of light reading on its historical importance. That's been done away with, unfortunately, so while Odyssey is still full of locations rich in history, you need to discover it all for yourself. But now you can take a Discovery Tour. 

There are five different tours and tour guides, including your old mate Herodotus, covering the themes of philosophy, famous cities, daily life, war and myths. Once you finish the tours, you'll be quizzed, so pay attention. Completing objectives will also net you rewards like new avatars and mounts.

While Odyssey is by far the most fantastical of all the Assassin's Creeds, it's still the product of loads of historical research. For the Discovery Tour, Ubisoft has also teamed up with a variety of historians and classicists to make sure they're not spouting nonsense.  

The Discovery Tour is available for free to all players today, but you can also get a standalone version on Uplay for $20.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's second DLC story arc, The Fate of Atlantis, tasks Kassandra and Alexios with confronting phoney gods and exploring some of the prettiest places the series has ever put on our screens. Normally you'd need to buy all three episodes, but this week the first one has shed its price and is free for everyone to keep. 

The Fate of Atlantis is even more of a fantasy RPG than the main quest, largely throwing out historical locations and replacing them with places like the Fields of Elysium or Atlantis. There are reasons, which are nonsense, but it's a good excuse to visit some really impressive locations. 

One thing it does have in common with the main game is that it's dense. Fields of Elysium, the first episode, gives you a pretty large mythological playground to muck around in, with forts, treasures, warring factions and plenty of quests. There are all the diversions you'd expect from Odyssey. And lots of lovely spots for screenshots. 

Odyssey's season pass and both DLC packs are also 50 percent off, if you end up getting hooked. Legacy of the First Blade, the first DLC arc, is rubbish, and I'd honestly avoid it. You need to play if you want the whole story, technically, but it cheapens all of your decisions and funnels you into a terrible, inescapable romance. I'm still seething that I had to date the most boring boy in all of Greece. Skip it and just go hang out with the gods. 

Fields of Elysium is free until September 1 on Steam and Uplay. 

In a recent investor call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot assured investors that porting games to Google Stadia isn't as costly a job as it may seem.

"The extra cost to put to make sure the games work well on Stadia is not that high," Guillemot said, according to a report by Gamasutra. "It's part now of our pipelines and we have a good relationship with Stadia to make sure it is profitable for us."

The technical details of Google's upcoming game streaming platform have been murky since its reveal. I previously assumed that Stadia would essentially stream the same PC version I could download elsewhere, but the process is more involved.

As Gamasutra points out, Ubisoft's smooth operation might be a special case here. The company was an early partner with Google on Stadia. Last year, some players got to try out a prototype version of Stadia (then called Project Stream) with a free copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

It's reasonable to assume that a Stadia port would generally be a lighter workload than, say, a console port if a PC version already exists. At the very least, you don't have to worry about overworking Stadia's maxed-out machines running the game. Though challenges unique to streaming could present new considerations for ports in the future, like input delay in multiplayer games.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's Story Creator mode is a neat editor that lets you design and share quests using some of the same tools employed to build the game. Pretty quickly, players realised they could also use it to farm XP, as well as cash, with minimal effort. Not for much longer, however, as Ubisoft wants to put a stop to it. 

While you can't just make a quest that doles out XP or cash for nothing, it's possible to create one that's so quick, simple and low-effort that it's effectively the same thing. Testing them last month, I just stood around for a couple of seconds while NPC allies killed enemies and that was it—reward earned. In a singleplayer game, you might think it would harmless, but Ubisoft disagrees. 

"These exploits risk jeopardising the overall quality, integrity, and purpose of Story Creator Mode and results in less visibility for the creative, interesting and frankly fantastic community stories that have been published," reads the forum announcement. 

Visibility is a point I hadn't considered. When looking at player-created quests on the map, I saw as many farming ones as regular ones, all of them potentially taking the place of a more full-featured quest. But a change in the terms of service and bans for people creating these exploits seems severe if that was the only problem. It's not, of course, because Ubisoft also sells XP boosts and the like. These farming quests were competing with Ubisoft's shop. 

Ubisoft doesn't mention the shop in the announcement, but it seems a likely concern and would explain the actions the publisher is taking. As well as the ToS changes and possible bans, these actions include removing farming quests from the recommendation system, so they can't enter the Hall of Game or tending section; hiding all stories reported for exploitation; and further solutions with future updates, to be announced nearer the time. 

Looks like it's back to mercenary work, then.   

Ubisoft certainly hasn't skimped on the post-launch support for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Weeks after the release of a new quest creator, the publisher has confirmed that the third and final part of the serialised Fate of Atlantis DLC will release on July 16. It's called the Judgment of Atlantis, and that's a screenshot from it above. It's our first look at Poseidon's realm, and by the sounds of things, it'll be the very last DLC pack for the game.

It follows the episodes Fields of Elysium and Torment of Hades, which released in April and June respectively. Before that, another serialised DLC series released throughout 2018, in the form of Legacy of the First Blade. For an already massive game, that's certainly a lot of stuff to do.

These are both paid expansions, though there's been a tonne of free stuff. In addition to the above mentioned quest creator (which, by the way, makes it super easy to level quickly, if you're averse to the game's interminable grind) a New Game Plus mode was released in March.

After filling Assassin's Creed Odyssey with countless new quests, most of them free, Ubisoft decided to let players take over and start crafting their own ancient adventures. The Story Creator is based on the tools used to create the game and boasts a huge 157-page manual, though it's less complicated than it sounds. And how have these new powers been put to use by players? Farming XP, mostly. 

If you activate the Story Creator and load up your game, you'll find blue quest markers directing you towards custom quests created by other players. There are some tests, some fights and some stories, but the most common seem to be farming quests designed to get you XP, or XP and cash, as quickly and effortlessly as possible. 

Story Creator quests let you set rewards, so you can create a quest that's over in a second, with rewards being doled out for nothing. If you do find yourself in need of a quick boost, you won't need to look very far, and they've all got conveniently obvious titles. 

Given how much XP and money Odyssey already throws at you, it all seems a bit unnecessary, and as Kotaku notes, Ubisoft continues to sell money and XP boosts in its cash shop, so this exploit might not be long for the world. 

The farming quests still work for the moment, however, so if you just can't wait for that next ability or big purchase, have at it. 

During its E3 2019 pre-show, Ubisoft dropped a big surprise: The Assassin's Creed Odyssey Story Creator, a free set of tools for Odyssey that allow players to write and script their own quests. The tool set is accessible from the official Odyssey website and is free for anyone to use, even if you don't own the game. Also, it's out today.

Ubisoft said that Story Creator is based on the tools the team uses to create quests for Assassin's Creed, and it seems pretty powerful. You can write branching dialogue trees, import any character model from the game, design combat encounters, and chain multiple quests into one larger story.

You can publish your story creations to the online hub for others to import into their game on all platforms. There's already a bundle of 14 quests live for folk to try out. The user manual for Story Creator is a whopping 157 pages, so it'll be interesting to see what people create as they get acquainted with the tools.